Dell’s new SharePoint Server 2010 reference configurations

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Dell’s new SharePoint Server 2010 reference configurations

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 deployments vary from small to large, depending on several factors, such as number of concurrent users, content database size, and the workload usage profile. Administrators should consider a combination of all these factors when planning for SharePoint farm deployment.

The Dell Global Solutions Engineering team helps our customers plan their SharePoint deployments for various farm sizes and recommends deployment best practices that include the complete solution infrastructure required for SharePoint farm deployment – including servers, storage, networking, and the SharePoint application itself.

We recently released a set of reference configurations for deploying SharePoint 2010 for small, medium, and large organizations, with a range of options from, physical to virtualized to partially-virtualized reference configurations.

In this reference implementation, the Web Front End and Application servers are virtualized, while the backend SQL servers are physical. PowerEdge M620 servers are used as the virtual hosts for the WFE and APP roles, and the M820 is used as the physical SQL database server. The Dell Compellent Series 40 Storage Center Fiber Channel (FC) storage array is used for the database storage. The F5 Networks® BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager™ (LTM) virtual edition load balancers are used to enable load balancing across Web frontend nodes.

The reference architecture used in this performance study enables high availability at all three tiers of the farm and provides complete search service application redundancy.

As a part of this performance study, several performance metrics were collected and analyzed:

Maximum concurrent user load validated: 10,000

Requests per second at maximum concurrent user load: 325/sec

Average response time at the maximum validated user load: 0.069 seconds

The above metrics indicate that the farm configuration used for this performance study could support faster, sub one-second farm response times even at the maximum validated concurrent user load.